1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a system that can record or play short segments of digital component video on specially-modified computer disk storage media. More particularly, it relates to such a system in which the video segments are stored and retrieved directly in parallel from the disk storage media without serial-to-parallel or parallel-to-serial conversion of a video signal stream. It further relates to such a system that can be expanded two dimensionally for multiuser and larger capacity requirements. It further relates to such a system incorporating smoothed motion.
2. Description of the Prior Art
It is known to record video on magnetic disks in order to be able to retrieve and display stored video images in real time. Commercially available real-time disk systems are available from Abekas and Quantel. The Quantel product is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,668,106, issued Aug. 18, 1987 to Keller et al. The system disclosed by Keller et al. uses parallel-transfer disks to record 4:2:2 D1 digital video images. However, the number of parallel data channels on the disk does not match the number of bits in a pixel. A complicated parallel to serial converter is therefore required to record on disk. U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,638,381; 4,647,986 and 4,674,064, issued Jan. 20, 1987, Mar. 3, 1987 and Aug. 18, 1987 to Vaughn, Vaughn et al. and Vaughn disclose a parallel-transfer disk system for real-time recording of digitized X-rays, but this system also does not have the same number of parallel data channels on the disk as the number of bits in a pixel. It therefore also requires a very complicated serial-to-parallel and parallel-to-serial converter.
A system for generating interlaced slow motion video by spatial and temporal interpolation is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,987,489, issued Jan. 22, 1991 to Hurley et al. In this system, successive fields of an input video signal are stored in field stores and are spatially interpolated as well as temporally filtered to produce new fields depending on the amount of motion detected in a scene.